Tourism without Tourists

A blog post by Adam. Crossing into Haiti was not quick. The Haitian boarder agent looked Sean and me up and down, scoured over our passports, and riddled us with questions. Everyone else (including Melissa and Delcia) went through in under a minute, but he spent a good five to ten minutes with each of us. Luckily a representative from the bus finally saved us, exclaiming the bus was about to leave without us. His suspicion could have been for many reasons. Our beards. Our matching Toros hats. Our strange zip-off travelers pants with lots of pockets. Or perhaps it was the fact that we claimed we were coming to Haiti as tourists.

As we soon learned, few people come to Haiti as tourists. People at our hotel estimated that five percent of their visitors are tourists. The rest are people working for NGOs or visiting the country on mission trips. The Lonely Planet states that two-thirds of Haitian tourists visit one beach on Haiti's north coast via cruise ship. Apparently they are told they are visiting Labadie, and never told they are in Haiti. And then there was our experience. We didn't talk to a single person who was visiting Haiti as a tourist. And every Haitian we met seemed shocked that we were there just as tourists. 

So who were the foreigners in Haiti if not tourists (since, as you might imagine, everyone we met at our two hotels was not Haitian)? There are business people. One American man at our Cap-Haïtien hotel was in eel baby fisheries. That is he caught baby eels in Haiti and shipped them live to Hong Kong where they became adult eels and then became dinner for humans. Apparently he had come to Haiti because Canadian and American eel fisheries no longer exist. Thank goodness Haiti has eels (and likely few regulations to control overfishing). 

But perhaps even more than business people there are NGO workers and their groups of volunteers. At our Port-au-Prince hotel there were a group of volunteers from Utah helping at a rehab center. As we would later learn, there are over 3,000 NGOs working in Haiti. With all those organizations and with all that money you might expect big things. 

It is possible that the NGOs have helped with post earthquake recovery. From what we saw there aren't lots of obvious signs of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Two of Port-au-Prince's most prominent churches are still in rubbles, but the tent camps and the various destroyed government buildings have mostly been carted away. That said, just about all commerce takes place on the streets and sidewalks, not inside buildings. Was it always like this because business people can't afford to pay for storefronts, or because the buildings are now too unsafe to occupy? Either way, even if the NGOs have helped with recovery, they certainly haven't elevated poverty in this very poor country. 

Which is strange, because the one thing they clearly have contributed to is the cost of traveling. With no budget travelers and instead primarily NGO workers with deep pockets, short term mission groups accustomed to North American prices, and foreign business people, Haitian hotel and restaurant prices are as high (or higher) than Israeli prices. And this in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. So in a strange way NGOs may have created worse conditions for tourism.

This is incredibly unfortunate because it's not so easy to travel in such a poor country to begin with. And then to have such high prices. Because aside from poverty and prices there are are many reasons for Haiti to be a tourist destination. First, it's proximity to the U.S. and Canada (where many people happen to speak French). Second, it's art and history are fascinating. The food is good too. Still, a thriving tourist industry is likely years or decades away. And so for now, most people who read this blog may have will have to stick with my brief trip-tick in the following blog entries....